I’ve got a thing for coyotes. In spite of all-out extirpation efforts on the part of the United States government, these tenacious and wise-cracking beings have expanded their natural range from chiefly west of the Rockies to the entire North American continent. I’m thrilled that my piece about coyotes is included in the lovely anthology What Wildness Is This, alongside work by Barbara Kingsolver, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko and other luminescents.

This story is adapted from a longer piece and was a finalist in the Writers At Work Fiction Fellowship competition. Judge Steve Almond had this to say about it:

If you’d told me I had to read a story narrated by a coyote, I’d fear the worst. But this was astonishing. It creates its own vocabulary and manages to feel incredibly realistic, and moving. This is a story about independence and survival, the price of strength, and it’s more human than 99.9% of the stories I read that are actually about humans.